High voltage mosquito drama

I came across the electic mosquito swatter sometime back and realized that this is one brilliant product ! Not sure whether this is a common product elsewhere, but here in Mumbai, they seem like a god send. Looking at getting rid of mosquito's from a jobs-to-be-done perspective, people wish it would be an instantaneous process. You see a mosquito just before you go to bed and wish it just went away/ died/ drowned etc.. People really just want to get rid of the mosquito immediately.

Products available in the marketplace such as Goodnight mats, liquid destroyers, mosquito coils etc do not serve the purpose people are looking for. They are not the most effective, are time consuming, and bank on driving the mosquito away rather than getting rid of it. Mosquito repellant creams are not the most widely appreciated product anyway.

The electric swatter serves this purpose extremely well.

1) The mosquito dies immediately.

2) The process of electrocuting the mosquito with a bat is really engaging and provides a sense of fun.

3) In 5 min you can rid the room of 90% mosquito's and be rest assured.

However, this is more of a home solution and wouldn't suit an outdoor camping trip. Looking at products from a jobs-to-be-done manner, really gives new insight into what consumers are trying to accomplish and what products they would probably use.

Flying for free ? Possible, if you participate in some market research !

In February, Kraft foods and JetBlue airways entered into a pact to allow Kraft to provide free offerings to travelers on a number of routes. Additionally, Kraft would send two employees to

promote the offering and obtain some feedback. In a separate occurrence, Peter Boatwright, a marketing professor at CMU, suggested the possibility of looking at air travelers as a captive audience for market research activities. The thought provides interesting insight into the possibilities. Now consider Kraft paying JetBlue a fee to have exclusive rights to the research activities in which travelers could participate. Might JetBlue give away air travel for free to ensure that it had enough of a captive audience for market research activities? Alex Slawsby of Innosight provides more details in his article - VA
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On Monday, February 4, Kraft Foods and JetBlue Airways Corporation announced that Kraft would provide free bagels and servings of its new Philadelphia 1/3 Less Fat Soft Cream Cheese to travelers on a number of Jet Blue’s routes during the month of February. In addition to free breakfast, Kraft also announced that it would send along two tuxedo-clad employees to distribute the products and also to talk up the promotion. In an article on the promotion, Peter Boatwright, a marketing professor at Carnegie Mellon University, supported the value of a captive set of fliers as an audience for in-flight market research. Boatwright did suggest, however, that if the concept were to lose its novelty due to market research experiments being performed on every flight, fliers would most likely tune out the researchers. In the meantime, however, could Kraft and Jet Blue be on to something?From a ‘jobs to be done’ perspective, this Kraft/JetBlue market research strategy should offer up some value to the researchers, but could be greatly improved. Today, many travelers thinking ahead to a multi-hour journey with limited or no connectivity to the outside world and limited or no ability to move, pack solutions to address jobs such as ‘reduce my boredom’ or ‘make the trip go by more quickly’. From game devices and music players to books and magazines to laptops, these solutions are often out in full force before the door is closed. Be it airplane, train, or bus travel, few individuals choose to sit in silence, staring out the window or contemplating their existence for the duration of the journey.
Leisure travelers visiting family or going on vacation are often extremely price sensitive. Before preparing solutions to address their ‘jobs to be done’ en route, leisure travelers often conduct extensive research to identify the mode of transportation that will satisfy their trip duration and cost objectives. In most cases, cost is the paramount concern – consider the legions of folks who travel through the Boston, New York, Washington D.C. corridor via bus service, enduring traffic jams and multi-hour journeys to avoid the air travel premium. Now consider the intersection of market research and the captive traveling audience, especially those folks highly sensitive to price. Research has proven time and time again that input from customers and noncustomers is essential to product development and positioning. As is the case, product and service companies often pay thousands of dollars to convene focus groups against which to test their offerings. It seems reasonable to assume that product or service companies would find the travelers occupying the 49 seats on a Greyhound Bus or the 150 seats or 100 seats on JetBlue’s Airbus A320 or Embraer ERJ-190 aircraft to be valuable market research participants. Might the Kraft/JetBlue partnership be headed in this direction?But back to leisure traveler desire to ‘minimize the cost of travel’ – the Kraft/JetBlue partnership assumes that flyers will be willing to taste Kraft’s product and offer their feedback to the representatives free of charge. What might happen if the market research process were automated through a slightly upgraded version of the back seat entertainment systems on JetBlue aircraft and if flyers could make money from participating? Imagine settling into your seat with an option to take part in several market research activities during the course of your flight. After inputting basic personal information into the system, you could agree to watch short advertisements or product promotions before answering simple yes/no or ‘rank your response between 1 and 5’ questions.
It seems likely that few flyers would participate in such activities for free, but given how much money companies spend on focus groups, might sponsoring companies be willing to reduce flyer airfare by $5 or $10 for each activity completed? Perhaps the number of activities or maximum reduction would be capped, but what if a large number of activities were available – could flyers reduce their airfare cost to zero or even make money? Might flyers be willing to select between different durations of activities with fare reductions consummate with length or complexity? Might flyers receive greater fare reductions if they are willing to share greater amounts of personal information? Consider that such a market research scenario could play out in busses and trains in addition to aircraft. If the interface, activities, and benefits are carefully thought out, it seems reasonable that many leisure travelers might choose to spend a significant amount of their journeys ‘working down’ the cost of those journeys and even potentially completing their journey having made a profit or received free product.In June 2006, Clayton Christensen and the Innosight Team authored an Innovators’ Insight analyzing the ‘Southwest Approach’. Many companies suggest that they are following a low-cost, low-price model similar to Southwest, but many also fail to create a model that leads to sustainable profit streams and competitive advantages while delivering on a low price promise. In that Insight, we suggested the notion of indentifying novel revenue streams and proposed a tact similar to the one discussed here – corporations could pay fees for the right to ‘sit next to a passive consumer, or a group of passive consumers.’ Now consider Kraft paying JetBlue a fee to have exclusive rights to the research activities in which travelers could participate. Given the cost of organizing and executing market research, might it actually be more profitable for JetBlue to have travelers in their seats than to have those seats empty? One day, might JetBlue give away air travel for free to ensure that it had enough of a captive audience for market research activities?

McDonald's - Rethinking Strategy

When one thinks of McDonald's, innovation as an adjective rarely comes to mind. However, to plug decreasing sales and in an effort to unlock new growth, the company had undergone a radical shift in strategy last year and came out with spectacular offerings. This has been possible only by realizing various customer need gaps and solutions to solve them. McDonald's attacked Non consumption - a concept common to disruption and blue ocean strategy to figure out new products and services. These are summarized below:

• McDonald's sought to increase sales during parts of the day when its share of total food and snack consumption was low. For example, while McDonald's owns peak meal times in many markets, most people still eat breakfast at home. New products targeting the on-the-go breakfast eater, such as the popular McGriddle product, helped the company grow its share of the breakfast market.
• McDonald's historic focus on serving portions that are fit for a meal (or two meals, critics might argue) presented another opportunity: snacking occasions. To get at these occasions, the company introduced products such as its chicken Snack Wrap. The product carries a low price point and can easily be consumed with one hand. The Snack Wrap has been a huge hit, with sales exceeding the company's projections by 20%.
• Many McDonald's franchises are now open 24 hours a day. To try to draw people at slower hours, McDonald's borrowed a page from Starbucks' playbook, improving the quality of its coffee and making its stores warmer and more accessible, encouraging consumers to linger in the afternoon or early evening.

Amazon Kindle Vs Sony Reader

Which digital book reader will establish itself ? Principles of disruption might give us some insight.

http://www.forbes.com/leadership/claytonchristensen/2008/01/29/disruptometer-amazon-sony-lead-clayton-in_sa_0129claytonchristensen_inl.html

Tata Motors - At the cornerstone of disruption

A very interesting article by Innosight's Josh Suskewicz on Tata Motor's new car - Tata Nano, explains how this could potentialy disrupt other car variants and also motor vehicles - VA

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We here at Innosight have followed the development of Tata Motors’ one-lakh “people's car” with great excitement for the last few years (we’ve written about the development of the car numerous times in Strategy and Innovation and elsewhere, and interviewed the Tata Motors management team a year and a half ago in preparation for a feature presentation at a conference on business model innovation). The car, now dubbed the “nano,” was officially unveiled yesterday to great fanfare.Do we buy into the fanfare? Well, Tata’s peoples’ car matches the pattern of disruptive innovation to a T. It uses an ingenious new business model – the supply chain has been thoroughly reconfigured, to the point where risk is distributed among suppliers and dispersed dealerships will participate in final vehicle assembly – combined with clever and unorthodox product innovations, such as a hollow steering wheel shaft, reimagined body, and plastic panels. Furthermore, Tata Motors engineers made critical tradeoffs, sacrificing many of the performance characteristics that most drivers take for granted – the trunk is in the front of the car and holds just a briefcase, the instrument panel features only a speedometer, odometer, and fuel gauge, there is no radio – in order to deliver a basic but critical value proposition to a new customer set: safe and affordable transportation for the emerging middle class in the developing world that is still priced out of the automotive market. This vision is at the core of the development of the Nano. Since first unveiling the idea and challenging his engineers to realize it, Tata Group Chairman Ratan Tata has been firmly focused on the goal of serving the underserved, of giving the families that crowd onto motorbikes in India’s crowded cities a better, safer, and more comfortable transportation option. He is competing against motorbikes and the non-consumption of cars, rather than any segment in the auto world that already exists. This is brought home in competitors’ reactions, as captured by The New York Times:Jagdish Khattar, a former head of Maruti 800 manufacturer Maruti Udyog Ltd., says it’s too early to say whether the Nano will overtake the original.“It’s a good product but it’s still too early to say whether it will overtake the 800 because it caters to a totally new market segment,” he said while watching a live telecast of Tata’s press conference after unveiling of the Nano.But clearly, at least one other manufacturer was worried.An official of Hyundai Motors, which unveiled an LPG version of its Santro Thursday, was more circumspect.“We definitely see it as impacting our sales,” he said in halting English, preferring to maintain anonymity. Anand Mahindra, managing director for Mahindra & Mahindra, Tata Motors’ primary competitor, said before the unveiling, “I think it’s a moment of history and I’m delighted an Indian company is leading the way.”The impact of the car figures to be enormous, in India and throughout the developing world. But what about its impact on the businesses and society in the developed world? The Times puts forth a compelling theory:Some analysts are predicting that just as the Japanese popularized kanban (just in time) and kaizen (continuous improvement), Indians could export a kind of “Gandhian engineering,” combining irreverence for conventional ways of thinking with a frugality born of scarcity. Or, as Indian auto executive Ashok K. Taneja describes the philosophy, “When I need silver, why am I investing in gold?”Gandhian engineering, or appropriate design, could be a terrific mechanism for forcing product and business model development to cleave to the need profile of a target segment. After all, there is no greater predictor of disruptive success than products and business models that are designed around important and unsatisfied jobs to be done.